In my first blog post of the series, I will be analyzing and visualizing two foundational questions about the election: 1. How competitive are presidential elections in the United States? 2. Which states vote blue/red and how consistently?

I also will be customizing my visualizations (extension 1). See citations for data and other sources at the bottom. Code can be found in my Github repository.

## # A tibble: 19 × 3
##     year democrat republican
##    <dbl>    <dbl>      <dbl>
##  1  1948     52.3       47.7
##  2  1952     44.7       55.3
##  3  1956     42.2       57.8
##  4  1960     50.1       49.9
##  5  1964     61.3       38.7
##  6  1968     49.6       50.4
##  7  1972     38.2       61.8
##  8  1976     51.1       48.9
##  9  1980     44.8       55.2
## 10  1984     40.9       59.1
## 11  1988     46.2       53.8
## 12  1992     53.6       46.4
## 13  1996     54.8       45.2
## 14  2000     50.3       49.7
## 15  2004     48.7       51.3
## 16  2008     53.8       46.2
## 17  2012     51.9       48.1
## 18  2016     51.2       48.8
## 19  2020     52.3       47.7
## # A tibble: 19 × 4
##     year democrat republican winner
##    <dbl>    <dbl>      <dbl> <chr> 
##  1  1948     52.3       47.7 D     
##  2  1952     44.7       55.3 R     
##  3  1956     42.2       57.8 R     
##  4  1960     50.1       49.9 D     
##  5  1964     61.3       38.7 D     
##  6  1968     49.6       50.4 R     
##  7  1972     38.2       61.8 R     
##  8  1976     51.1       48.9 D     
##  9  1980     44.8       55.2 R     
## 10  1984     40.9       59.1 R     
## 11  1988     46.2       53.8 R     
## 12  1992     53.6       46.4 D     
## 13  1996     54.8       45.2 D     
## 14  2000     50.3       49.7 D     
## 15  2004     48.7       51.3 R     
## 16  2008     53.8       46.2 D     
## 17  2012     51.9       48.1 D     
## 18  2016     51.2       48.8 D     
## 19  2020     52.3       47.7 D
## # A tibble: 2 × 2
##   winner races
##   <chr>  <int>
## 1 D         11
## 2 R          8

## Rows: 51 Columns: 2
## ── Column specification ───────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
## Delimiter: ","
## chr (2): State, Abbreviation
## 
## ℹ Use `spec()` to retrieve the full column specification for this data.
## ℹ Specify the column types or set `show_col_types = FALSE` to quiet this message.
## Rows: 51 Columns: 2
## ── Column specification ───────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
## Delimiter: ","
## chr (2): State, Abbreviation
## 
## ℹ Use `spec()` to retrieve the full column specification for this data.
## ℹ Specify the column types or set `show_col_types = FALSE` to quiet this message.

## Rows: 936 Columns: 3
## ── Column specification ───────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
## Delimiter: ","
## chr (1): state
## dbl (2): electors, year
## 
## ℹ Use `spec()` to retrieve the full column specification for this data.
## ℹ Specify the column types or set `show_col_types = FALSE` to quiet this message.
## # A tibble: 2 × 2
##   winner electoral_votes
##   <chr>            <dbl>
## 1 D                  276
## 2 R                  262